Deck, a startup that claims to be constructing “the Plaid for the remainder of the web,” has raised $12 million in a Sequence A funding spherical — about 9 months after closing its seed financing, it tells TechCrunch completely.
The brand new increase, led by Infinity Ventures, brings Montreal-based Deck’s whole raised since its January 2024 inception to $16.5 million. Golden Ventures and Higher Tomorrow Ventures co-led its seed increase.
Deck claims that it’s constructing the infrastructure for user-permissioned information entry — throughout all the web. Its browser-based information brokers “unlock” the info from any web site via automation.
To place it extra merely, Deck helps customers join any account on-line and goals to show the knowledge into structured, usable information, with full consumer permission.
President Frederick Lavoie, CEO Yves-Gabriel Leboeuf, and CTO Bruno Lambert (pictured above, left to proper) co-founded Deck in June 2024.
The startup’s method is to deal with the online itself as an open platform. It operates below the premise that customers have “tons of useful information” locked behind usernames, passwords, and session-based portals with no actual approach to share it securely.
Deck hopes to vary that.
“Identical to Plaid gave builders a simple, safe approach to entry checking account information with consumer permission, Deck does the identical for the 95% of platforms that don’t supply APIs equivalent to utility portals, e-commerce backends, payroll methods and authorities providers,” Leboeuf informed TechCrunch. Its purpose is to make it simpler for builders to entry the info customers have already got with out all of the handbook work
When a consumer connects an account, Deck’s infrastructure handles the whole lot behind the scenes. Its AI brokers log in, navigate, and extract the info “similar to a human would — however sooner, extra reliably, and at scale,” mentioned Leboeuf.
It then generates scripts to maintain these connections stay and reusable with out AI involvement going ahead.
“Firms use Deck to remove the friction of getting their consumer information from locations the place APIs don’t exist — or are incomplete, costly, or unreliable,” Leboeuf mentioned. “We principally ‘Plaid-ify’ any web sites. Whether or not you’re doing accounting, KYC, automating reporting, or verifying a enterprise, Deck helps you to construct these options in minutes as an alternative of months.”
Repeat founders
Leboeuf and Lavoie beforehand began Flinks, a startup that was dubbed the “Plaid for Canada.” The Nationwide Financial institution of Canada acquired it in 2021 for about US$140 million. (Lambert was one in every of Flinks’ first engineers.)
After that sale, the founders began speaking to entrepreneurs throughout industries.
“Repeatedly, we heard the identical factor: Our information is damaged,’” mentioned Leboeuf.
One founder had thousands and thousands in meals gross sales intelligence trapped in dozens of “clunky” distributor portals. One other spent months making an attempt (and failing) to entry music royalty information — to assist customers declare over a billion in unpaid royalties.
“We even skilled the issue firsthand,” Lavoie mentioned. “The sample was clear: information entry was fragmented, fragile, and failing — and never simply in banking. It was in all places.”
So that they constructed Deck, which in the present day competes with Arcadia, an organization that the founders had tried utilizing however grew annoyed by.
The trio believes that latest developments in synthetic intelligence (AI) have underscored the urgency of open entry to non-financial information. With out it, AI dangers being educated on outdated, biased, or incomplete info.
Initially, the corporate has been targeted on working with utility firms, having linked to over 100,000 utility suppliers in additional than 40 international locations throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. Prospects embody EnergyCAP, Quadient, and Greenly. Deck can be working with non-utility clients equivalent to Notes.fm, Glowtify, and Evive Smoothies. It believes that its expertise could be utilized to any trade the place information is “trapped” in on-line accounts.
“Consider us because the bridge between the applying layer and foundational instruments like browser automation or AI operators equivalent to Playwright, Browser Use, OpenAI Operator,” Leboeuf mentioned. “We’ve taken the messy, foundational items — authentication, information normalization, fee limiting, consent administration, and antibot safety — and turned them right into a seamless, productized platform.”
Fast development
Deck has seen the variety of builders constructing on its platform “develop drastically” within the final couple of months, in response to its founders. In February, for instance, its connections grew by over 120% in comparison with the earlier month. The startup’s pricing mannequin is performance-driven, charging shoppers primarily based on “profitable” API calls.
“Which means you solely pay when the info works,” mentioned Lavoie.
Like Plaid and Flinks, Deck depends solely on express consumer consent to attach and gather information.
“Whereas it could hypothetically be violating some phrases and situations, our expertise follows the open information worldwide pattern that was initiated and tremendously popularized by open banking, and has pushed regulators the world over to make it clear in a number of jurisdictions that buyers and companies have the best to entry and switch their information,” mentioned Leboeuf.
Deck additionally claims to have proprietary applied sciences to keep away from being labeled as bots or crawlers. These applied sciences embody a number of completely different strategies, equivalent to imaginative and prescient computing and human-like mouse motion.
“Whereas we see a whole lot of antibot applied sciences in sectors like telcos or HR, the place there’s a whole lot of fraud from identification theft, numerous different information verticals have restricted to no antibot applied sciences,” mentioned Lavoie.
For now, it’s not utilizing the info assortment to coach fashions, as an alternative specializing in constructing one of the best ways to gather the info fairly than constructing merchandise on high of the collected information itself.
“We function in a twin consent surroundings, the place we would want end-user consent, and Deck’s shopper consent, to make use of the info,” Leboeuf mentioned.
The corporate quickly plans to launch an information vertical creator, which it claims will let any developer “stand up and working for any information verticals for any trade… very quickly.”
Presently, Deck has 30 workers.
Jeremy Jonker, co-founder and managing accomplice at Infinity Ventures, believes that Deck is “remodeling” the user-permissioned information sector, “simply as open banking reshaped monetary information.”
“With a modular platform and reusable recipes, they ship pace, reliability, and flexibility that reach effectively past utilities,” he informed TechCrunch. Jonker has joined Deck’s board as a part of the financing.
Intact Ventures, together with earlier backers Higher Tomorrow Ventures, Golden, and Luge Capital additionally participated within the Sequence A financing.
